Gotcha. Sorry to have wasted my time talking with you.

Ok but in the meantime, can we all agree to vote for the person who isn’t a convicted felon? And a rapist? And a racist? And a fascist? And a xenophobe? And an insurrectionist? And like twelve other things that should disqualify him from office? Surely we can agree that, in the absence of overthrowing of the most powerful government in history, that at the very least we should do what we can to keep Donald Trump out of the driver’s seat?

So you just want to overthrow the government? I’m not saying I’m opposed to it, but I’d want to know what your plan is for if you actually mobilize a resistance.

But it isn’t wrong. I’d like it to be wrong, and I can appreciate wanting to shift the Overton window, but that’s not where we are and it won’t change before November.

There are more single issue voters in America that support Israel and won’t support Harris if she wavers than there are single issue voters in America who will start supporting her if she threatens to withdraw US support of Israel. That’s the reality of the world we live in. If she changes her position on Israel, she will definitely lose the election, just as De La Cruz and Stein and West will lose the election.

The margin of error is already razor thin, and it’s never been more important for America to run up the score. Winning isn’t going to be enough. Harris needs to make the legal challenges and ballot shenanigans look frivolous and absurd.

You want to convince me to support a third-party candidate, first we need to put Trump in prison, then we need to roll out Star Voting, and then we need some third-party alternatives that aren’t obvious Russian assets.

Do you legitimately believe Claudia De La Crúz is propped up by Republicans? The Reps and Dems collaborated on kicking them off the ballot in some states.

The Republicans want RFK off the ballots, and the Dems want De La Cruz, Stein, and West off the ballots. I’m not maintaining a delusion that this isn’t a game. Both sides are propping up the third party candidates that hurt their opponents.

But yes, I legitimately believe Claudia De La Cruz is propped up by Republicans, because they are doing it out in the open. Look at Georgia, where the Republican Secretary of State overruled the courts and kept independent candidates on the ballot after RFK voluntarily withdrew.

https://atlantaciviccircle.org/2024/08/29/georgia-secretary-state-overrules-judge-third-party-presidential-candidates-stein-kennedy-cruz-west/

I agree we need to push the Dems forward, because capitalism will always resist progress.

Harris and Trump are not anywhere close on foreign policy. Harris does support Israel, and Israel is engaged in a genocide. I’m not disputing that. But That’s the only overlap between Harris and Trump, and Trump is proactively supporting the genocide, whereas Harris at least pays lipservice to the goal of ending the violence.

I can understand why that makes it impossible for you to support Harris. I cannot understand why you are unable to see the difference between Harris and Trump. You may not like Harris’ position, but if you hate that, Trump’s position is objectively worse. Opposing both of them, refusing to take a side, refusing to cast a vote, these are all the choices that take you out of the equation. Your vote literally won’t count.

Harris is not going to change her stance on Israel before the election. After the election, she may evolve on the issue if she continues to face pressure. Maybe, maybe not. But there will be the possibility to make the argument. Right now, the Dems have decided that supporting Israel gains them more votes than it loses, and they can live with that.

And this is where the third party arguments fall off the rails. Where has Jill Stein been the last four years? De La Cruz, to her credit, has been organizing protests and fundraising, but with little actual effect. Change happens slowly, with dilligence and dedication. It requires thoughtful, strategic effort, and doesn’t happen in a single election cycle. It doesn’t happen at the highest level, in a fptp race between two people vying for the chief executive office. You have to win hearts and minds, install progressives at every level of government, convince donors that it is in their best corporate interest to oppose genocide.

The world is a horrible place, and you can be part of the solution or part of the precipitate. You make your choice and you live with the consequences. We plant the trees that will shade our grandchildren, or you can stamp your foot and pout because the trees aren’t providing shade now. But you make a choice either way. Are you helping, or not?

All candidates propped up by Republicans to siphon votes from Harris. We have a shitty system, but the way it works is Harris or Trump or abstain because you don’t care.

I don’t have a problem with people voting for a third party as long as they admit they are good with Trump winning. It’s great to see socialists and greens showing up at the polls and voting for progressive candidates at every level. I just can’t stand the naivety of a third-party voter thinking they are going to teach Harris a thing or two.

This isn’t Bush v Gore where it was two centrist oligarchs battling it out to be more pro-business. The is President Donald J Trump Part II, this time with more fascism and executive immunity. If you lived through the first term and think, “yeah, I don’t care if that guy comes back,” then I don’t know how to even relate as a human. Harris ain’t perfect, but she must win.

It’s mind boggling that pro-Palestinian voters would support Trump. I understand opposing Biden and Harris supporting Israel, but Trump will be unquestionably worse for Palestinians.

They also may be much larger data centers than in other countries. This source is just a total count of individual data centers.

It’s a reference to spam callers. For a few years, right around when everyone was realizing they shouldn’t answer the phone for unknown callers, it was really common to get calls that, if you picked up, would play a pre-recorded message along the lines of “Hello! We’ve been trying to get in touch with you regarding your car’s extended warranty. You may be entitled to money and blowjobs, and if your warranty expires, your hair will fall out and your car will be repossessed. To speak to a representative, press 1. Por habla Esperanto, marqué νούμερο 二.”

If you pressed 1, you would ostensibly be connected to a high-pressure sales rep trying to sell you a worthless maintenance contract. Nobody is really certain, though, because despite hundreds of millions of people receiving twelve of these calls each day, not one person every stayed on the line longer than “regarding…” In fact, my memory on the end of that message might be a fabrication, because I don’t think I ever heard it.

I thought you were exaggerating, but it’s a literal nightmare on mobile.

Jokes on them, I don’t have any.

Oh. I made myself sad.

Replace “Haka” with “Lei ceremony” and “LOTR museum” with an observatory.

I sort of had that happen to me. In middle school, someone started a rumor that I was gay. This was early 90s, and I was young, so it bothered me. I was new to the district, and didn’t have many friends, and being called “gay” was something bad in my mind.

But then I suddenly had a bunch of friends who were being really supportive. Some were gay, some were straight, but everyone just encouraged each other to be who they are. I learned a lot from them about acceptance and being myself. Years passed.

But none of them ever asked me if I was gay. Anyone that asked, I would say “no, I’m straight.” Apparently people thought I was in denial.

But then I asked a girl out, and she was like, “Wait, but… Aren’t you gay?” The look on her face is seared into my subconscious. It was a mixture of confusion, betrayal, and contempt. Like I had been pretending to be gay to worm my way into her friendship, all the while being a lecherous creep waiting to strike.

Also it turns out, one of my gay friends was working up the courage to ask me out. It was the talk of the lunch table, except they had been keeping it from me because they didn’t want to embarrass our friend.

So I had to go to that friend and explain that I liked them as a friend, but I was not attracted to men. He then claimed that he wasn’t interested in me, which was really fucking confusing. And then I had to clarify to everyone at the lunch table that I was, and had always been, straight. Which is weird enough, but I had also now rejected one friend and creeped on another.

Perplexica? What sort of sauce goes with that?

For a minute I legit thought Italy had dropped a new pasta shape.

VaultTec being evil wasn’t really part of the first game, but the evil megacorp exploiting (and encouraging) disaster to put profits over human lives, that’s an obvious critique of capitalism. Maybe he didn’t set out to make it a critique of capitalism, but that became part of the foundation in later games.

Microsoft gave CrowdStrike unfettered access to push an update that can BSOD every Windows machine without a bypass or failsafe in place. That turned out to be a bad idea.

CrowdStrike pushed an errant update. Microsoft allowed a single errant update to cause an unrecoverable boot loop. CrowdStrike is the market leader in their sector and brings in hundreds of millions of dollars every year, but Microsoft is older than the internet and creates hundreds of billions of dollars. CrowdStrike was the primary cause, but Microsoft enabled the meltdown.

Even if that’s the case, how is it Crowdstrike’s place to call these other companies out for claiming something similar will never happen to them?

I agree completely, which is why I added that last sentence in an edit. This is a bad look for CrowdStrike, even if I agree with the sentiment.

Thus far, it had only ever happened to CS.

Everybody fucks up now and then. That’s my point. It’s why you shouldn’t trust one company to automatically push security updates to critical production servers without either a testing environment or disaster recovery procedures in place.

I doubt you’ll find any software company, or any company in any industry, that has not fucked up something really important. That’s the nature of commerce. It’s why many security protocols exist in the first place. If everyone could be trusted to do their jobs right 100% of the time, you would only need to worry about malicious attacks which make up only a small fraction of security incidents.

The difference here is that CrowdStrike sold a bunch of clients on the idea that they could be trusted to push security updates to production servers without trsting environments. I doubt they told Delta that they didn’t need DRP or any redundancy, but either way, the failure was amplified by a collective technical debt that corporations have been building into their budget sheets to pad their stock prices.

By all means, switch from CrowdStrike to a competitor. Or sue them for the loss of value resulting in their fuckup. Sort that out in the contracts and courts, because that’s not my area. But we should all recognize that the lesson learned is not to switch to another threat prevention software company that won’t fuck up. Such a company does not exist.

If you stub your toe, you don’t start walking on your hands. You move the damn coffee table out of the pathway and watch where you’re walking. The lesson is to invest in your infrastructure, build in redundancy, and protect your critical systems from shit like this.

It’s not really criticism, it’s competitors claiming they will never fuck up.

Like, if you found mouse in your hamburger at McDonald’s, that’s a massive fuckup. If Burger King then started saying “you’ll never find anything gross in Burger King food!” that would be both crass opportunism and patently false.

It’s reasonable to criticize CrowdStrike. They fucked up huge. The incident was a fuckup, and creating an environment where one incident could cause total widespread failure was a systemic fuckup. And it’s not even their first fuckup, just the most impactful and public.

But also Microsoft fucked up. And the clients, those who put all of their trust into Microsoft and CrowdStrike without regard to testing, backups, or redundancy, they fucked up, too. Delta shut down, cancelling 4,600 flights. American Airlines cancelled 43 flights, 10 of which would have been cancelled even without the outage.

Like, imagine if some diners at McDonald’s connected their mouths to a chute that delivers pre-chewed food sight-unseen into their gullets, and then got mad when they fell ill from eating a mouse. Don’t do that, not at any restaurant.

All that said, if you fuck up, you don’t get to complain about your competitors being crass opportunists.

I read that as “California launches electric trains at US…” and I was confused.